


In the Heat of the Night

by Luthien



Category: Pet Shop of Horrors
Genre: Insomnia, M/M, Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-02-01
Updated: 2004-02-01
Packaged: 2017-10-05 23:43:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/47317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luthien/pseuds/Luthien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leon has insomnia. What can he do to relax himself enough to be able to get some sleep?</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Heat of the Night

**Author's Note:**

> Set not long after the end of the episode 'Despair', from Volume 1 of the manga, in which Leon and Count D meet for the first time.

Leon turned over in bed, not for the first time that night.

He tossed.

He turned. Again.

He rolled over onto his back and found himself staring at the ceiling. He screwed his eyes shut, but that turned out to be even worse than staring at the ceiling, so he pulled a pillow out from behind his head and buried his face beneath it.

That worked. Sort of.

Too bad he couldn't breathe.

With a growl of frustration, he threw the pillow aside and turned over in bed for the umpteenth time. This time, he landed on his side, which at least meant he wasn't staring up at the ceiling. No, he decided after a moment, this position was even worse. Lying on his side like this, he could see the digital clock on his nightstand. The little red numbers on its face glowed at him malevolently through the darkness. 2:17 AM, they said. He squinted, and tried his best to make them say something else. 12:17 would be a much better time. Just a little after midnight. That would work. Perhaps if he just stared at the clock hard enough he would find that it really was 12:17 after all.

He looked hard at the clock.

The clock stubbornly refused to show any time other than 2:17.

Leon stared at it some more.

It still said 2:17.

Oh, wait!

Damn. Now it said 2:18. Before he knew it, it would be three o'clock in the morning. And then four. And only an hour or so after that, it would start to get light. Christ. He rolled onto his other side so that he was staring at the window. The lights of the city outside glimmered gently around the edges of the blind.

He had to be up before six tomorrow -- _this_ \-- morning. He needed his sleep. He had a job to do. An important job. A cop needed to have his wits about him all the time. Leon couldn't afford for some crook to offer him a cup of tea and then slip something past him just because he was all bleary-eyed and yawning from lack of sleep.

It was just the sort of thing that pet shop owner might do, tittering at Leon from behind one long-finger-nailed hand all the while, most likely.

It had been four days now. Four days since the case of the dead actor and the just as dead lizard lying at his side had brought Leon to the pet shop in Chinatown. Four days since he'd first set eyes on the shop's owner. Four days since the owner, Count D, had confirmed that the lizard had indeed come from his pet store. Four days since-- No, three days. Three days since the Count had made that ridiculous suggestion that Robin Hendrix had somehow been killed by looking into the eyes of his pet lizard. It was impossible, anyone could see that, and yet the Count had seemed serious when he'd mentioned it. As serious as he ever was about anything, anyway. That damned smirk never seemed to really leave his face, as though he was constantly laughing at the world in general -- and at Leon in particular.

The guy was obviously loopy. How could any sane person sit there and stare at you and calmly tell you that a pet lizard was really some sort of Medusa that could kill with a look? Although, now that Leon came to think about it, the Medusa in Greek mythology hadn't just killed with her stare. At least, the Medusa in that-Saturday-morning-cartoon-he'd-seen-as-a-kid-and-couldn't-remember-the-n ame-of-now had done more than just kill. That Medusa had turned men to stone with a glance. He hadn't thought about the Medusa or all that myth stuff, or even that cartoon show, in years. His job dealt in cold, hard facts, not fairytales. And yet he'd been thinking about the Medusa with her hair full of snakes -- not lizards -- and her deathly gaze a lot lately.

The case had been preying on his mind all week, though strangely it was the memory of the pet shop owner's stare that wouldn't leave him alone, rather than the look on the dead man's face. It had been unnerving, that mis-matched stare. It still was unnerving, remembering the way the Count had looked at Leon with such undivided attention, so completely focused, the very first time they met. For a moment, those eyes had been looking at him as though he was the most important thing in the world. Or the only thing in the world.

Leon shifted uncomfortably in bed. Who the hell had eyes those colours, anyway? Purple was a weird enough eye colour by itself, unless you were that fat old movie star, at least. What was her name? The one who always seemed to be getting married with Michael Jackson hanging around somewhere nearby? Damn, he couldn't remember her name. It didn't really matter. Freaks, the both of them. Just like that damned pet shop owner: one purple eye, which was only just on the outer fringes of normal, and one golden, just like a cat's eye, not normal at all.

Those eyes. He couldn't get them out of his mind.

The Count had stared at Leon again this afternoon, at the funeral. It had only been for a moment, or so Leon had thought at the time, but it had been as unsettling as the first time the Count had looked at him - and all the other times since, if he was being honest. Now those eyes were with him constantly. They were waiting there to stare at him every time he closed his eyes, glowing purple and golden yellow in the darkness.

Leon wasn't quite sure how the Count had emerged from the investigation with his character still as lily white as the skin on his smirking face. Leon had encountered more than his fair share of suspicious characters in his time as a cop, and Count D was the most suspicious of them all. So why was it so hard to pin anything on him? How had he slipped free of the net of justice?

It had only been four days, but in the space of four days, Count D had become a problem. Leon's problem. A problem Leon couldn't hope to get rid of unless he managed to get a decent night's sleep first, but sleep had also become a problem over the last four days. Lack of sleep was making him irritable. He'd become so irritable, in fact, that Jill, who usually coped fine with most of Leon's moods, had stopped speaking to him yesterday afternoon. He'd been so preoccupied with trying to think up ways to prove that the Count really was the dangerous criminal that Leon knew him to be that he hadn't realised Jill was refusing to talk to him until she was about an hour into her sulk.

That hadn't gone down well.

Well, it wasn't like it was Leon's fault, not really. Not when he'd hardly had a wink of sleep all week.

Leon shifted again. He couldn't get comfortable in bed, had no chance of sleep because he was spending all his time trying not to think about those weird eyes and trying desperately not to pay attention to the... other thing. The thing that couldn't possibly have anything to do with the face that stared at him constantly, the face that he couldn't get out of his mind, no matter how hard he tried to make it go away and leave him in peace.

Of course it had nothing to do with the pet shop owner, but the fact remained that Leon was as hard as any man ever turned to stone by the Medusa's stare.

Stupid thing. It wasn't like it was going to get any action around here. Not tonight. Not any night for over a month now.

This problem had been going on all week. It couldn't continue. On the weekend, he should go out and have a few beers. Wind down and party a little. Meet some people. Meet a _woman_. Or two. He really needed to get laid. That was his main problem. Well, that and Count D. How could he be expected to sleep when he just knew that the Count was out there plotting... something or other? How could he be expected to sleep when every time he closed his eyes all he could see was that stare burning itself into his brain?

Was that what Robin Hendrix had seen, when he'd looked into the eyes of his lizard? Had he known then that he'd never be free of that stare, whether his eyes were open or closed, whether he was waking or sleeping, for the rest of his life? Maybe that was why-

Fuck.

Now Leon was starting to sound as crazy as the Count, even to be considering such an idea. Was this what severe sleep deprivation did to you? He really needed to get some sleep. And he really, _really_ needed to get laid. But to do that, he needed to find a woman. He could do that. He'd done it before. Plenty of times. Finding a woman wasn't really a problem. _Keeping_ a woman, on the other hand...

His cock throbbed, hot and unhappy against his thigh.

Leon sat up in bed, fumbling for the switch on the lamp and then blinking as the light came on. He pushed back the covers and looked down at his erection, willing it to go down and let him rest.

It didn't pay the slightest attention to him.

There was an easy way to fix this particular problem, of course, but it was a solution that Leon had been doing his best to avoid for three nights now. Three long nights. Three long, hard-

Oh, for fuck's sake. He really had to cut out the melodrama. The fact was, he hadn't been getting any sleep, he still wasn't getting any sleep, and he wouldn't get any sleep any time soon unless he did something about it. It was no use lying here whining to himself about it. He knew what he had to do. He just had to get down to business and do it.

It sounded so simple when he put it like that. It _was_ simple. At least, it should have been. It was just that he'd already tried this remedy. He'd already _almost_ tried it, anyway, that first night after he'd been to the pet shop. He'd lain here, staring at the ceiling, trying his damnedest not to close his eyes, so that he wouldn't see that steady gaze, all purple and yellow, staring at him. Just staring.

Leon closed his eyes against the memory, then snapped them open again as the image in his mind only burned more brightly without the distraction provided by the sight of his immediate surroundings. Not that the contents of his sparsely-furnished bedroom were providing a lot in the way of distraction at this point, admittedly. Not in the dim light provided by the lamp, which left most of the room in shadow. He could barely make out all the posters and pin-ups which covered the walls.

Letting out a deep, frustrated breath, he rolled right to the edge of his narrow bed, and reached down with one hand to the floor below. His fingers encountered some soft fabric first. When Leon picked it up he found that it was a black-striped t-shirt. So that was where it had got to!

He flung the t-shirt across the room and reached down under the bed again. This time he found a pair of jeans, one leg pulled inside out. He tossed the jeans across the room to join the shirt. Reaching under the bed again, he pulled out another t-shirt, a chocolate bar wrapper, two empty beer bottles and a single dirty sock. He also found a lacy black... underthing which definitely didn't belong to him. It looked a little sad, hanging from his finger in mid-air. It had looked better when the last visitor to his bed had been wearing it. In fact, it had looked a _lot_ better as he was pulling it off her.

She'd left the next morning. She hadn't even stopped long enough to retrieve her underwear. He hadn't seen her since.

Leon screwed the garment into a ball and threw it across the room to join the other junk he'd found under the bed. He threw it so hard that it hit the wall with a soft thunk.

She'd left, and hadn't looked back. Hadn't even said goodbye. It was her fault that he was currently alone, and in need, and reduced to feeling around under his bed looking for... Ah! His fingers slid across a flat, slippery surface. Leon pulled the magazine out from beneath the bed. The well-stacked blonde babe looked out at him from the cover, a sultry expression on her face. That was more like it. There was no strange, sideways glance from odd-coloured eyes here, no mocking little smirk on those pouting, dark red lips.

The blonde's lips were really darker than he was in the mood for tonight, though. And there was something about the camera angle that just wasn't quite right. Leon flipped through the magazine, looking for something better. Another blonde caught his eye, one with even better vital statistics than the one on the cover. He almost settled for her, but at the last moment, as he was reaching into the drawer of his nightstand for the tube of Glide, he decided he didn't like her hips. There wasn't enough curve to them. They were too straight, too boyish and-

Leon slammed the drawer shut and turned the page.

He found a redhead a couple of pages further on, mouth and legs both open in invitation. That was more like it. Just right.

He didn't even get as far as opening the drawer this time before deciding that the redhead wasn't right at all. Her skin was far too pale, almost as white as snow, and it reminded him of... of someone else's milky, unblemished skin.

Leon's jaw clenched as he tore the page in his haste to get away from the sight of come-hither lips and red hair, and white skin that somehow just wasn't quite white enough. The ripped page stuck out at an angle until he stuffed it back into the magazine, where it formed a lump beneath the pages on either side. Leon irritably squashed the pages flat and then did what he realised he should have done first up: opened the magazine at the centrefold.

Something made him look away just as the magazine flipped open at the middle, his gaze instead going back to the clock, which now said 2:29, hardly ten minutes more than the last time he'd looked at it. He really needed to get this over and done with. If he was successful in achieving his aim, he might even manage to drop off to sleep before three and get three whole hours of sleep before he had to get up. That would be more sleep than he'd had in one hit any night this week.

It was sort of reassuring to think of what he was about to do as a target to be met. Something which had to be done, and which would then be over and done with. It brought it all onto familiar ground. Plain, hard facts were what he liked, and what he understood best.

Leon moved the magazine over towards the lamp, but didn't look directly at the centrefold to begin with. He forced his eyes down to the bottom of the page, starting with long, shapely feet digging into sand, and then slowly moving up pale-but-not-too-pale legs which seemed to go on for ever. Her hips were narrower than he usually liked, but not too narrow. Her chest was nearly bursting out of the too-small, wet shirt she was almost wearing. Any other time, Leon would have stopped there to contemplate that tiny little shirt and its contents, but something drove him onwards. Tonight, it was important to see her face, to have that face pictured clearly in his mind when he-

Shit.

He threw the magazine down on the bed beside him, so violently that it bounced against the mattress and fell over the side, where it slapped hard against the recently-cleared floor.

Shit.

He shouldn't have looked at her face. He should have just concentrated on the rest of her body. It would have been more than enough. It had been a huge mistake to think that he wanted anything so... so... so specific. Anonymity. That was best with these sorts of things. No names, and especially no faces.

And no eyes glittering mysteriously from behind a curtain of dark hair, just like, just like...

He should have stuck with the redhead. Or the blonde. Yeah, the blonde. He'd always had a thing for blondes. He'd go back and take another look at her. That's what he'd do.

He pulled open the top drawer of his nightstand again, and rummaged for the tube of Glide. After a moment's search, he found it, pushed right to the back.

It was empty.

If Leon had believed in a higher power he would have been certain that the gods or fates or spirits or whatever truly were conspiring against him tonight. As it was, he just cursed loudly and rummaged in the drawer some more, searching for something - anything - that he could use as a substitute.

His patience ran out about ten seconds into the search when he pricked his finger on something sharp. Letting loose a cry of wordless frustration, he jumped out of bed, yanked the drawer free, and emptied its contents out onto the covers. He combed through all the bits and pieces that had been in the drawer, separating out the useful items from the junk - man, there'd been a lot of junk stashed in that drawer - until he ended up with a very large pile of stuff to be thrown out, and a very small pile of things which needed to go back into the drawer.

He dumped the larger pile of things unceremoniously onto the floor; he'd get rid of that stuff tomorrow. He tossed the remaining items back into the drawer before fitting it back into its slot in the nightstand, all save one little plastic bottle which contained something called Silken Caress.

It looked like his last girlfriend had left behind more than just her underwear. He had a vague memory of her using that stuff for- well, using it. He flipped open the lid and squeezed a little Silken Caress onto his fingertip. It oozed down the side of his finger, soft and cool and just as slippery as he remembered. He hoped there would be enough. It was only a very little bottle, after all.

Leon flopped back onto the bed, eyeing his prick balefully. Usually, this amount of distraction would be enough to make it lose interest, but not this time. It remained as stubbornly erect and ready for action as ever. He reached down beside the bed and retrieved his magazine from where it had landed earlier. Setting the bottle of Silken Caress down on the nightstand for the moment, he flipped determinedly through the pages of the magazine in search of that blonde with the skinny hips.

It didn't take him long to find her. She stared up at him from the page through lowered lashes, which made her seem almost demure until you noticed the provocative pout of her lips - just like the lips of any girl in this and every other girly magazine Leon had ever seen, so no real surprise there. Leon stared back at her through half-closed eyes. She was leaning forward, displaying her cleavage to maximum advantage. That was always his favourite bit, on any woman, and almost guaranteed to get him off in no time flat.

He lowered the magazine onto his chest and reached for the little bottle on the nightstand, squeezing a generous quantity of the cool, slippery contents onto his hand. A sigh of relief escaped his lips as he wrapped his hand around his cock and he pushed up into the welcome grip. He'd wanted this, needed this, for days now. He'd been denying himself for so long that it wasn't going to take much at all to get him there.

He took up the magazine again in his free hand, zeroed in on the blonde's most obvious feature, and let his other hand move slowly up and down his cock. That was it. Nice and slow to begin with. It was comfortable and soothing and relaxing and... not doing a hell of a lot. Despite his dire condition, he wasn't getting the familiar little zing that he always, always got when he jerked off in front of a picture of his very favourite bit of a woman. He tightened his grip and speeded up the action, keeping his eyes fixed on the picture before him.

After several minutes of concerted effort, and quite a bit extra Silken Caress, he abruptly brought his hand to a complete halt. If he continued on like that, he was going to rub himself raw. And there was still no zing. Despite all his efforts, nothing was happening down there. In fact, he thought as he ran his hand loosely from base to tip, worse than nothing seemed to be happening. Was he imagining it, or did the flesh against his palm feel a little softer than it had a moment ago? Leon looked down his body in horror. Could it be- Was it... drooping a bit?

_This is not happening to me_, he thought desperately. He'd _never_ had this sort of trouble before. He'd never had any sort of trouble when it came to sex - well, apart from keeping the same girl longer than a week, anyway. But that didn't count. That wasn't like... this.

It was probably just that he wasn't in the mood for blondes tonight. That must be it. He grabbed the magazine up from where it had fallen, unheeded, onto the sheet beside him. He started right at the beginning, browsing each page quickly as he went, ignoring all the blondes, looking for... He wasn't quite sure what he was looking for, except that it obviously wasn't a blonde. He would know it when he found it.

Leon paused as he came to the page with the redhead. He sort of felt uncomfortable and not quite right when he looked at her. Apparently, he wasn't in the mood for redheads, either.

He shouldn't have been surprised when he stopped at the centrefold. He'd always liked dark hair, after all. That was nothing new. He took a good hard look at her face, which was partly obscured by that long fall of hair. He couldn't really tell for sure what colour her eyes were, even the one that didn't have hair in front of it, but he thought they were sort of brownish. They definitely weren't gold, or even purple, so this girl was clearly nothing like... anyone that Leon might have met any time recently. So what if she had a slight, delicate frame? Lots of girls looked like that. So what if her eyes were slightly - what did you call eyes like those? Almond-shaped? So what? The rest of her was still definitely girl-shaped, with all the usual parts that made up any female, so there was nothing wrong in responding to how she looked. She was a fucking centrefold, for chrissakes.

Leon grabbed the Silken Caress. A dollop of the stuff landed on his palm. He squeezed again, but this time all that came out of the bottle was a faint hissing sound. Leon cursed long and creatively. It looked like this was his last chance if he was going to get to any sort of vaguely satisfying outcome tonight. Resolutely, Leon dropped his hand to his cock, and stroked. Once. Twice. Much to his relief, it didn't feel very soft at all. Just like before, it was almost as hard as flesh turned to stone by Medusa, whether you were talking about the female one from Greek mythology or a Medusa of any other sort. And wasn't that what had got him into this predicament in the first place, anyway? Myths and fairytales and things that turned you to stone with a glance: he'd never had to worry about any of it until the day he'd set foot in that pet shop.

He forced his attention back to the centrefold. Dark hair, that was what he liked. Dark hair against pale, flawless skin and red, red lips curving up into the barest hint of a smile and-

His cock jerked hard against his hand. Leon wanted to cheer. This was much more like it. Coming back to the centrefold had definitely been the right move.

He let his hand move along his cock at a leisurely pace, enjoying the sensations - enjoying the sensation of being back on familiar ground and back in control while he did what came naturally. He was just a man, when it came right down to it, and every man did this at one time or another.

Well, almost every man. Count D, what about him? Did he ever do this, too? Did he lie awake in the night with his hand at his cock, no longer poised and composed, no longer unruffled and coolly mocking, but desperate and needy and _hard_? And if he ever did do what came naturally to every man, what did _he_ think of that made him that way? What made D lose it, so he was hot and panting and flushed, with a faraway look in his eyes, seeing something that no one else could see? What made _him_ hard as stone?

Leon's hand was moving faster now, slipping up and down his prick in increasing urgency, setting just exactly the right rhythm in a way that no one else could ever quite match. His eyes had fluttered almost shut, but he was still keeping watch on the picture in front of him, though the girl's features were becoming blurred and indistinct.

His hand brushed over the head of his cock and he gasped, closing his eyes as exquisite, almost excruciating response jolted through him. Almost there. Almost. Even with his eyes closed, he could still see straight, dark hair, lying like a veil in front of a delicate, lovely face. He imagined he was looking at that figure from behind, dark head turned away from him so that the main thing he could see was one bare, white shoulder just asking to be touched. He wanted to touch it, to turn that beautiful body towards him so he could see it properly.

And then the figure _was_ turning towards him and- and-

It wasn't the girl from the magazine. Odd-coloured eyes looked at him, an expression in them that Leon had never seen before. They stared off into the distance, not seeing. Dark red lips were open in a wordless, desperate cry that was a world away from the smug little smirk that infuriated Leon so much.

Leon moaned, suddenly desperate to do more than touch. He wanted to lick and taste and- He dropped the magazine and brought his hand up to his own mouth, biting and sucking the sweaty flesh. He swallowed hard as his other hand flew faster and faster along his aching cock, hips pushing up with each downward stroke.

He could still see the dark-haired figure in his mind, and the expression on that face was every bit as wanting and needing and desperate as Leon felt. Every feature of that face stood out in vivid detail and yet couldn't quite make out the details lower down. It didn't matter. He knew. He knew that the figure's hands were between its legs, between _his_ legs, just like Leon's. Just exactly like Leon's, and nothing could stop it now. Nothing, nothing-

The thought got lost in the moment as his hips pushed right up off the bed, his body went rigid, and pleasure zigzagged wildly before his eyes as his cock pulsed and spent itself into his hand.

Leon slumped back down on the bed, able to do little but tremble and gasp for breath. He was panting hard and his heart was thundering in his ears as though he'd just run a sprint race.

He wasn't sure whether he'd won or lost. It didn't really seem to matter, at least for the moment. All that mattered was lying here letting his breathing slow, letting the familiar lassitude take over his body. That was what it had all been about, after all. It had all been in the cause of relaxing enough so that he could get some sleep.

Leon glanced over at the clock. 2:37 AM. He might still get those three hours of sleep he'd been after. He noticed a box of tissues sitting on the nightstand beside the clock. Leon grimaced slightly as he lifted the hand still clasped loosely round the end of his cock and grabbed a handful of tissues. He should have remembered the tissues before he- before. He managed to wipe up most of the spunk and the vestiges of Silken Caress from his fingers, and cleaned away the worst of what remained around his groin.

2:39 AM.

Leon tossed the used tissues into the wastepaper basket, pulled the covers up over his nakedness, and switched off the light. He yawned, and turned over in bed - straight onto something flat and stiff, and cold against his bare skin. He shot out one hand to turn on the light, while the other pulled the thing out from beneath him.

It was the magazine, still lying open at the centrefold. Muttering under his breath, Leon slammed it shut without looking at the girl in the picture. He didn't want to think about her. He didn't want to think about anything at all. Not tonight. Not until morning. Or later. Not until he'd at least gotten a little shut-eye.

Leon turned off the light again and flung the magazine beneath the bed. It landed with a thud, out of sight and, as far as Leon was concerned, quite, quite out of mind.

_Until the next time you go to see the Count,_ a treacherous little internal voice reminded him.

Leon thumped his pillow, and determinedly screwed his eyes up as tight as he could. There. He was almost asleep already.

The Count's eyes were waiting for him as soon as he closed his eyes. Of course. Gold and purple looking right into him, as though they could read his thoughts, and that annoying little smile was playing on his lips again. Just like always. Then, suddenly, it all changed. Those eyes were staring right into him, but this time as though they couldn't see him, and the mouth was open, and desperate need was written all over that face instead of the usual mocking amusement.

Leon rolled over onto his back, eyes wide open, and stared up at the ceiling. He continued to stare aimlessly at the ceiling for some time, all the while carefully thinking about nothing at all.

Finally, he looked over at the clock again. 3:01 AM.

It looked like sleep was going to elude him again tonight. He'd get some sleeping pills from a pharmacy, first thing in the morning. That should do the trick. He should have thought of that before.

He looked back up at the ceiling again. He was still staring at it some minutes later when sleep finally overtook him.

His dreams that night were filled with images of mismatched eyes staring into him and through him, never leaving him alone, and of dark red lips smiling enigmatically at some private joke which he somehow knew was entirely at his expense.

* * *

On the other side of the city, in Chinatown, in another bedroom, a dark-haired man lay back against his pillows, quite awake despite the lateness of the hour. His odd-coloured eyes sparkled with mischief as he glanced out the window towards the main part of the city, and his dark lips curved into a tiny smile.

What an entertaining diversion this detective was proving to be.

Count D closed his eyes, his smile deepening. He couldn't wait to see what morning would bring.


End file.
